What Your Social Media Efforts Desperately Lack
Practices
The view from very close to the ground – are hit-and-miss at best, but they do exist at your company. The best example is in customer service, where the small social team is active on Twitter and Facebook to handle complaints. That’s a good practice. It isn’t going to transform anyone’s company, but it’s better than nothing, for sure.
Tactics
The view from the second floor balcony: here, too, there are a few bright spots. It’s nice to see HR trying to recruit where potential candidates choose to spend their time. The cheesy canned messaging is unfortunate, though. Marketing has quite a few active tactics going: drumming up interest on a couple of social channels, for instance. That too is a good start, anyway.
Overall, this company – like so many more out there – is really weak even at this basic level of social media planning and execution.
Strategy
I think you can agree, “Get on social and do something” is no strategy. This company has no social strategy at all.
A good, safe strategy for a beginner like this might be to establish a blog network from among the company’s experts and guests invited in from the outside, experts who will add valuable insight and drive traffic, both. I often use SAP as an example of a company that is really doing this well. It provides a lot of value to potential customers, who might just say, “Oh, look at that link over there. I didn’t know SAP did that. Let me check it out.” Nice soft sales strategy, versus pushy and obnoxious.
The company should have several complementary social strategies engaged at once.
- Marketing could work with R&D for the blog effort
- Sales could really put together an outstanding prospecting effort by training its people in the use of social to represent the company and provide outsiders with value first, which could lead to sales
- HR’s social media strategy could be to join learning communities, and even (bolstering marketing and PR’s efforts), the HR leaders could build brand awareness and respect for the firm this way
Now, How About Principles?
That to me is the sweet spot of any business discussion. How would a company’s principles fit in with a social media strategy? Better yet, how would those principles inform that strategy and cascade down into tactics and practices?
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